Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do So Many Anime Take Place in High School?
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Via_01
 Posts: 551 |
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I feel the same. I'm currently going through college, and it's hell compared to high school. I mean, sure, I'm not having THAT bad of a time right now and i've had the chance to do a lot of interesting stuff, but high school was WAY more relaxed: barely any obligations, and even though I met some bullies here and there, people were generally alright. Now, however, some of the people I have to deal with are worse than bullies: they are outright terrible people. So yeah, escaping to my high school years is not something I'm against. Now, I do see a narrative reason that would explain the popularity of the school setting among japanese writers: kids are dumb. Kids are very dumb, and they'll make a lot of mistakes, and they'll get their feelings crushed, and they'll try to solve their problems in very ineficient ways. That's just part of being a kid. If an adult was thrown into the problems I've seen teenagers face in anime, they'd be resolved in half the time, or maybe they wouldn't even happen at all. It's a way to create easy and believable drama, because it's not unlikely for a kid to escalate things out of proportion. |
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AJ (LordNikon)
 Posts: 513 Location: Kyoto |
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IDK, I've always found it to be a pretty close mix between high school and middle/jr. high school in anime.. Though, for the sake of fan service, you step up to the high school stuff. Frankly, I'd rather see more college stuff like Genshiken, which hits a little too close to home from my college anime club days back in the 80's.
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lavmintrose
Posts: 90 |
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Force of habit is also a big thing. You're writing a manga and you want it to fit on the shelf right next to your favorite manga. What does your main character need? Her superpowers, her teammates, and her school uniform. You're just going to start out in that pattern because you see so much of it, and unless you have to really think about it, there's no reason to really get out of it.
I honestly don't think high schools in Japan vs. U.S. are really all that different. I just think Americans tend to want to say they had a bad time anywhere and Japanese tend to be more positive. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11519 |
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That hardly ever happens, since their parents are all dead from car accidents or terminal illnesses, or overseas on business. The few remaining parents who live with their kids are supportive or at least non-meddling, with just a handful of exceptions to illustrate Bad Parents. Asuna's mother might be in a class of her own, being controlling, but still good at heart. |
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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The only thing I'm "discriminating" against is an overly long question that is unanswerable on the face of it. You see how long the questions I print in the column are. You wrote one here that is 3-4x as long as it should be or needs to be. I'd have to spend a good amount of time cutting down and rewriting, which is not something I'm always willing to do when I'm up against a tight deadline. Also, instead of a question I can actually spend a few paragraphs exploring, you ask why something doesn't happen or exist. It's almost impossible to prove a negative. So I skipped it. I get 10-50 questions a week typically, so I have plenty to choose from. I don't even look at who sends in questions until I decide on one, and I have to write who the asker's name is at the top of the column. Good lord, is this what you do when the teacher doesn't call on you? |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2034 |
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I think it's the same reason so much of our popular fiction involves teenagers. Much of it is consumed by a pre-teen/teen/young adult demographic, and they're reading about characters they can relate to. Teenage characters have broad appeal through a wide range of ages. Harry Potter wouldn't be as interesting to kids if it featured adult characters, but adult readers can still get some enjoyment out of it with teenagers in it.
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I like the college-aged anime because it allows characters to have a bit more freedom in terms of stuff like drinking or owning cars. I guess I still need to check out Golden Time, but most anime I've watched involving college students tend to be ones I like. |
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Merengues.Pop
Posts: 22 |
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I believe that just like books, anime is most of the time centered around teens and young adults because they give the most ample themes to talk about.
After all, there's nothing worth writing about but human spirit, and who embodies best the changing nature of human spirit than high-school teenagers and young adults? You finish discovering yourself, learn more about others and how that changes you and begin the rest of your life. Teens with all their drama help author a lot... The next age-group that is interesting are the middle-aged adults and their existence crisis, but they are not as appealing like cute girls in high school or studs playing high-stakes games as far as storytelling and merchandising go. |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 671 |
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I always chalked it up to a few things. One, ease of setting. School is a highly generic setting that can be easily interchanged without much problem while leaving plenty of room to make interesting or not. It's harder to do with adult life settings like work or family life where antics that make most anime interesting would be odder than they already are.
Second, audience. As noted, the target audience is generally either approaching, in, or shortly removed, from high school, making it a familiar and relate-able backdrop. But in part to audience is the factor of the culture the individual has grown up in. As Justin noted in a prior piece some months ago, at about high school age is also when a lot of kids really start getting their first tastes of freedom. not to the extent portrayed in anime, but you do have kids who enjoy certain levels of freedom (living on their own for example) that far fewer kids in Western cultures get to experience. Couple that with the rather comparatively rudimentary nature of post-academic life, it creates a scenario wherein school at high school age is a lot more enjoyable. Schools in Japan also tend to have fewer open expressions of the same problems that plague primarily American schools. Third is story. Most anime deal with characters going through great changes in thinking, emotions, and outlooks on the world, a hallmark of adolescence. These changes are what gets used for the vaunted character development phase of the stories. For an adult, those sorts of lessons are usually accompanied by economic calamity, sudden realization of parenthood, or something akin to a mid-life crisis. Let's face it, few of those scenarios will make for a very captivating story in the eyes of most viewers. Love Live would be harder to pull off with a bunch of women from some office banding together. Even those shows that do take place with adults outside of the precise theater of a school tend to frame those adults as being logically and emotionally still kids. giving up the ghost and just making them high school kids in school takes some of the stress out of writing the rest of the story. |
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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I've taken it a bit that this is also a time when youthful ideas are put to the test vs the larger world. For Japanese, I think they want to figure out how their peers work by exploring them in different avenues when they were still forming. See how other people were built to understand how they work. Something like that. Once everyone grows up they all blend in to the corporate machine.
For the American Superhero trend, and vigilantes, I think it stems from a long history of fighting with one hand tied. We can't shoot back at the bad guy cause he has a hostage! Americans feel they have to get involved everywhere and have an opinion on everyone and every issue. but we can't there are rules in the way, there are hostages, there are foreign cultures. Like Batman. He keeps arresting bad guys and they keep breaking out to chaos more trouble. Gotham is the World and Batman is America, running around beating up bad guys whether or not anyone else him to, yet unable to have the power or will be to Evil about it. Wouldn't it just be nice to have a license to be a vigilante and have superpowers to just wipe out the bad things? To actually say 'that guy is an asshole and needs to get punched' and do it? Superhero obsession is how Americans cope with modern politics. |
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mewpudding101
Industry Insider
 Posts: 2209 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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It does, but it can mean green in some instances. For example, fresh vegetables can be called ao (blue) but it really means green. The same goes with stop lights. "Ao dayo." means "The light is green," despite it being green (midori). It's just a thing. Also, yeah, I have to say, my best years were college and being out in the real world. Neeeeeever high school. Ever. So I find myself getting kind of tired of middle/high school seishun dramas (unless it's a realistic portrayal like Kizudarake no Akuma). |
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GhostStalkerSA
 Posts: 425 Location: NYC |
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To add to this, since kanji are Chinese characters adopted by the Japanese, the blue/green double meaning originates and still holds in Chinese as well. The Chinese character (hanzi, as opposed to kanji, both written with the same characters, 漢字, but pronounced differently because of the language difference, though the modern Chinese Simplified hanzi system in use since the 50s and 60s or so uses a different character, 汉, for the first part that Japanese hasn't adopted) 青, pronounced qing1 (the 1 meaning the first tone, a flat one over the vowel in the syllable) in Mandarin using standard pinyin romanization, can also mean blue or green depending on context. The phrase 青春 in Chinese, pronounced qing1chun1 (again, first tone on both), also means youth. Examples of usage include the legendary dragon 青龙 (written here in Simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese uses a different second character), pronounced Qing1 long2 (2 indicates the rising tone over the vowel) in Mandarin, the Azure (or Blue) Dragon of the East, one of the famous 4 legendary animals based in Chinese constellations that protect the 4 cardinal directions and name the gates of palaces and such. Japan adopted usage of the same system when they were imitating Chinese culture, and may be better known to those who know or watch a lot of anime as Seiryū, written 青竜 (again, the second kanji is different from the Chinese usage, since Japan changed them in their own way). As for high school, has it really been a decade since I graduated from it? I still remember high school as a pretty good part of my life, although with a ton of bumps. You see, my high school, Stuyvesant High School, one of the best if not the best public high schools in New York City, the jewel of the city's Specialized High Schools, and one you need to test into, is located 3 blocks up the West Side Highway from the World Trade Center, and 2001 was my freshman year. Yes, that means that 9/11 was my 2nd full day of class, and we were evacuated from the building after the first tower collapsed that day. I still remember the sight of a firefighter, covered head to toe in dust from the collapsed tower, stumbling in through the large set of doors that faced south towards the WTC, hacking up to try and clear his lungs of the ash while his fellows passed him bottles of water to clear his mouth and rinse off his head and face as we were evacuating through an emergency exit that faced north onto Henry Hudson Park and the West Side Highway. That was quite an experience to start off my high school career, and still sticks with me a decade and a half later... School was cancelled for 2 weeks or so while the administration got its bearings, what with the school building so close to Ground Zero that it was within the frozen zone and was used as a triage and resting place for first responders. Then we spent 2 weeks of abbreviated classes when Brooklyn Technical High School, another of the Specialized High Schools, graciously lent us their building for classes, which we attended in shifts with their students. No diss on Tech, but it just wasn't the same. Still, we got through it until they cleaned out our own school building a month or so later, and we were back there soon, with everything trying to get back to normal, but with reminders of the attacks everywhere, mostly in the increased security to get in the building. Met a bunch of friends there afterwards, hanging out with the mostly Magic: the Gathering/video/board game playing crowd who were also into anime, although I've mostly lost touch with them by now. There were some cliques there, and I was in one of them, but it wasn't as super pronounced and confrontational as I get from the horror stories of other high schoolers or the media makes it out to seem like. It was fun hanging out with them when I did. Also, Stuy was 59% Asian and 39% white when I attended (yay, selective testing admission!) Nowadays, it's more like 73% Asian, 20% white. The New York Times ran an article on the racial demographics of Stuy a couple years back, and it counted only 44 black students out of a total student population of 3500 or so. When I attended, I could literally count the number of black and Hispanic students I encountered on a daily basis on one hand... But eventually my grades there suffered after a while due to a combination of factors, and my stereotypical Chinese parents got concerned. I was fine in my math classes, chemistry was fine, AP History hung me up on a couple of papers, and I was doing relatively fine in Mandarin, but physics was beyond me, and I started cutting English classes... I loved some of the teachers there, especially a number of my math teachers (RIP Mr. Geller), who ultimately influenced my decision to major in math in college after a couple semesters puttering along in Engineering instead (damn you physics!) and my Mandarin and Chemistry teachers were great too, along with a bunch of my history ones. So I spent the last year and a half of high school at a military boarding school in upstate New York, over by West Point. That was "fun" in other ways, but also very tedious, what with all the military protocol minutiae and bullshit I had to put up with from superior cadet officers and military instructors and the like. Also, the PT wasn't fun as I was terribly out of shape and still mostly am, but it got better once I got used to it. Military parades were pretty boring and they kept me on campus for weekend after weekend in the spring when otherwise I'd be able to go home back down to the city otherwise, but being able to march in the Columbus Day Parade down 5th Avenue in Manhattan in 2005 was fun, even if I wasn't yet an officer then and therefore didn't get to march with the rest of them with my saber in hand, instead finding myself in the middle of the undifferentiated mess that was the enlisted cadets marching in formation, not even separated by company like every other parade we did, with rifles on shoulder. Weekend inspections were terrible as well, losing the weekend home again and spending all night preparing the barracks to make sure everything was spotlessly clean and perfectly to SOP... Mandatory chapel attendance when you were on campus on a Sunday was boring as all hell, since I was raised non-religious and I was deeper into my atheism at that point in my life, as befits teenage rebellion. They only turned on the internet for a couple hours a night, and then shut it off immediately when lights out was called, although when I became an officer, I could get an extra hour before lights out, and therefore another hour on my computer. All of that sucked, and was part of the military minutiae and bullshit I was complaining about above. The classes weren't as hard though, and pretty much a cakewalk after the stuff that I went through at Stuy. I graduated near the top of my class academically, not finishing higher only because I was pretty lazy and didn't go the extra mile in some classes. Once I got some rank myself (graduated a JROTC 2nd Lieutenant) and didn't have to deal with a lot of the bullshit that lower rankers had to and could order them around, it got to be pretty ok, I guess. Also, I got to shoot as part of the Rifle Team, which was fun, although I had to put up with a season of PT my senior year before we were allowed to shoot, and I messed up my knee soon after we were allowed on the range, cutting my opportunity to do so short while I rehabbed it. Looking back on it, it wasn't all bad, although the tedium and petty bullshit was pretty terrible when I look back at it. But I found ways to deal once I got used to the place, and there's some nostalgia for the place when I think back on it. Some of my fellow cadets there were ok people, and I was friends with them while I was there, but others were absolute shitheels (one of my roommates my senior year was the latter a little bit) and I'm glad I no longer have to deal with them even this far removed from it. Also, the demographics of this school and my previous one couldn't be any more different, and while there were a lot of Asian foreign students there, there were also a lot of ghetto-ass people there as well, which I'm sorry to say, may have left a not to good impression on me at the time. This is the same military school that Donald Trump attended way back when in the 60s or so, and the same one he got a bit of flack for saying that although he didn't serve in the military, he knows what military life was like because he attended this school. It's been in the news lately because of that and the Trump connection, and recently went bankrupt a couple years ago because of mismanagement by the board of trustees and a rotating number of superintendents unable to keep enrollment up an retaining teachers. Almost all of the teachers I had at that school have since moved on, and enrollment, while low at couple hundred when I attended, with a graduating class of 80 or so, dropped to a total enrollment of 50 or so within the last two years. The school's bankruptcy plans were scuttled by a judge last year, and the school was put on the auction block. The Board of Trustees president who most of the alumni blame for running the school into the ground lined up a buyer, but that one fell through, and there were nasty rumors abound that Hasidic Jews from one of their exclusive enclaves in the county were going to buy out the property and demolish it to create a satellite community in its place. The school failed to open on time for classes last September because the aforementioned buyer fell through, and this got a ton of press due to the Trump connection. A lot of the teachers failed to get paid at the end of the previous school year, and a lot of the students transferred out, fearing that the school would be closed for good after that year. A vocal group of alumni were hoping that Trump's presidential run would draw more attention to the school and Trump would buy it in order to save the property and get some positive press on the presidential trail, but when he was approached by an alumni group a couple years back for a donation or an offer to buy the property, he declined because he felt that there was no way he could return the school to profitability in any amount of time, and therefore felt it was a bad investment. When the school eventually went up for auction a couple months later, it was bought by a Chinese group that apparently runs boarding schools, and reopened a couple weeks later with drastically reduced enrollment and teaching staff. I think they have about a couple dozen students now? The new owners say that they're gonna try and increase enrollment by attempting to attract foreign students and that they're gonna keep the military program there as a part of that, but who knows how well it'll work. When I look back on it, I didn't think I'd feel nostalgic about the military school, what with all the bullshit and some of the people I had to deal with there, but when I think about it, I remember a bunch of the decent times I had there and realize that a part of me misses it. When I attended, I was wishing that I had never transferred schools and finished my diploma at Stuy instead, but some part of me now cherishes the time I spent there, which I never thought I would. I still sometimes wear the windbreaker jacket, low quarter spit-shined shoes, combat boots, trench rain coat, and other uniform items that I was given there when the occasion merits. I still have my dress and school uniforms, with all of the decorations and patches and name tags affixed to them, hanging in my closet. I still credit it with my interest in the military and remember how to do close order drill and sometimes find myself running through it from time to time when bored. I still call cadences in my head in the rare occasion where I find myself running for exercise, or if I'm walking a long distance. A lot of the military knowledge I learned there stuck. Also, being at the school while a hazing scandal was breaking amongst cadets in another company got me a mention in the New York Times, contrasting the controversy with my recent 1600 SAT score. Honestly, I miss it sometimes. And while it didn't really prepare me for all the freedom to make poor decisions that I ran into when I started college, and I wound up crashing and burning there through my own fault. But you live and you learn and you grow up. I still think back on high school, both my high schools, with quite a lot of fondness and nostalgia, albeit more for one than the other. It surprises me sometimes, but I've learned to reconcile my memories and try and discard the more terrible parts of the experience. It wasn't all bad, but some parts were more memorable than others, just like all of life. Man, I got really philosophical here at the end and wound up writing a lot more than I expected. Sorry for the effort post guys! |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6895 Location: Kazune City |
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I accept the preponderance of HS characters and settings as something that "goes with the territory" of the anime medium, much like giant robots that would collapse under their own weight in real life, or male characters getting beaten up by females for the slightest of real or imagined sexual infractions. Though I don't automatically avoid/drop shows from the HS category, I wouldn't mind a few more college/university settings once in a while. As others have said, having older characters allows for elements like traveling/driving cars, drinking real alcohol, or having somewhat more mature relationships. There is the soul-crushing 4th-year job search to contend with, but if HS anime can sidestep entrance exams as much as they do, surely college titles can avoid the job search by keeping the main characters younger and just limiting appearances by a senpai side character who's looking for work.
But aside from some romantic frustrations and related drama, and in spite of a few minor academic hiccups that didn't derail anything, I can look back on the highschool era as a mostly happy and successful time. (No doubt the "Easy Mode" setting of being a non-poor Xtian cishet white dude helped.) College only managed to improve on that because a good number of my HS friends went to the same school. |
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AnimeLordLuis
 Posts: 1626 Location: The Borderlands of Pandora |
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There are a lot of Anime series that take place in high school but if you think about it there are also a lot that don't such as Dragonball Z, One Piece, Naruto, Psycho-Pass, Attack on Titan (I don't count JH) Fairy Tale, Most Gundam series, Spice and Wolf, Fullmetal Alchemist and many many more.
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GeneStriker
Posts: 156 |
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Oddly enough, the plus for you is a minus for me. Everyone is boring now, and I wish I could go back to when the people around me were interesting, or at least shared my interests. It sucks because after suffering through 3 years of high school awfulness, and despite some nasty emotional stuff ruining the first semester, the second semester of my senior year was the first time I had ever truly felt like I had somewhere I could be myself. Somewhere I felt I belonged. And now it's gone. I don't see my friends anymore. I can't make new friends because I'm too busy 'preparing for my future,' and so is everyone else. College has been draining the life out of me, and I can hardly stand it, but I have to, because if I don't, I can't get the job I want. It doesn't help that the only people who seem to share my interests are either horrible people I don't want to be around, or friends from their high school who don't want to add any more to their group. So anime is nice. I'd be lying if I didn't get tired of high school characters sometimes, but I love the medium as a whole, with all of its little quirks. It has all the escapism I need, with some extra bells and whistles I won't find in many other mediums. If I want fluff, it's there. If I want deep psychological analyses or artistic experiments, that's there too. I don't mind if it uses high school characters. ... Wow. That got really heavy there. Whoops. Just one of those weighted topics, I guess. |
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